For some of Trump’s hires, the antisemitism may be the point.

The antisemitism Donald Trump is enabling in his second term is not an anomaly. It is a function of his longing for dominance.

This is my brain under Trump: I grasp for memories of leadership, as opposed to dominance.

In 2004, I covered my first White House Hanukkah party. George W. Bush established the tradition and it was a novelty then (the season soon became a nightmare for White House Jewish liaisons).

I long for opportunities to observe top leaders in unmediated circumstances, to glean from the person separate from their manufactured selves, and from the personas their rivals and enemies hope to embed in our consciousnesses.

I really hated the Iraq War, and so I was taken aback: My first time seeing Bush not at a press conference, and I liked this guy. He embodied what it means to be a gracious host, not just by setting aside the Red Room room for Maariv, not just by encouraging hora dancing in the State Room.

He introduced a bunch of tousle haired kids from the University of Maryland, Kol Zimra, an acapella group. And then he stepped back from the light, and he watched them sing Maoz Tzur. They were good but what I fixated on was Bush’s slow grin: He was having the best time.

A bunch of students were singing Hebrew, and George W. Bush clearly thought this was a great use of the White House space.

I mean, I was cringing: the Jewfros bobbed and one of the boys was beatboxing. But Bush had the better take: For one night, the White House was the Jewish People’s House. At other times, he made it the Black People’s House, the Hispanic People’s House, the Muslim People’s House. The cumulative effect, emulated by his successor, Barack Obama, was to make it the People’s House, period.

Last week, Donald Trump hosted a different Jewish gathering at the White House, meeting with hostages released from captivity.

This was, no mistaking it, Trump’s house. Trump, sitting behind whatever replaced the Resolute Desk after Elon Musk’s son smeared his snot on it, commanded the room. The hostages stood, rigid.

This is what Trump said: “So you didn’t think until I came along, you didn’t think it would begin,” he said, referring to the release of hostages. (Dozens were released in a deal brokered in November, 2023, by Joe Biden, but never mind.)

Of course the former hostages agreed. “No!” They said in chorus. “Please do it again!” one pleaded.

The hostages genuflected because who wouldn't after Trump sentenced Ukrainians to death in a fit of pique because the country’s president, Volodomyr Zelensky, refused to roll over for him.

The antisemitism Donald Trump is enabling in his second term is not an anomaly. It is a function of his longing for dominance.

Leadership, grounded in vision and policy, follows a trajectory.

Dominance is a rogue missile.

Trump’s presidency has sown doubt and division and fraught conversations over how best to confront the fears it has stirred.

This is true of Democrats, and has been the subject of much navel gazing in the party and analysis (and mockery) outside of it. Monica Hesse in The Washington Post has a thorough (if despairing) rundown here.

It is also true of Jewish conservatives who recognize antisemitism in their movement’s ranks but are deluded into thinking it is the exception, not the rule.

It’s not quite the broader issue The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg outlined last week when she appropriated “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to describe how Republicans are rapidly covering up any trace of dissent they might ever have had with Trump.

The Jewish conservatives I’m referring to are appalled at the employment of unadulterated antisemites, at the proliferation of antisemitism on Trump-adjacent platforms, including Elon Musk’s Twitter and Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Or some of them are: The Republican Jewish Coalition has for years held itself up as an exemplar of a partisan group ably fulfilling its dual mission: campaigning for the party in the Jewish community, and defending the community in the Republican Party.

Yet since Trump’s inauguration, the RJC has been silent about expressions of antisemitism that just four years ago would have prompted articulations of outrage, for instance against Marjorie Taylor Greene and her theories of Jewish intergalactic control.

I asked the RJC about Kingsley Wilson, the deputy Pentagon press secretary who has peddled neo-Nazi talking points about the 1915 antisemitic lynching of Leo Frank. They did not reply.

So, disappointingly, the RJC is doing the ostrich thing as are other MAGA-affiliated Jews, like the former ambassador to Israel, David Friedman and Ohio Congressman Max Miller.

Alex Isenstadt, in “Revenge,” his account of Trump’s return to office, reveals that Miller expressed alarm to the campaign about the unhappy echoes of Jew baiting in the lies Trump spread about Haitian immigrants.

Trump apostle Charlie Kirk attacked Miller last week as anti-Christian and said his “fidelity is not to America.”

Instead of calling out Kirk’s antisemitism, Miller boasted that his loyalty to Trump predated Kirk’s. (By months.)

It’s true, a number of Jewish conservatives (and conservatives who have longstanding relationships with the Jewish community) are speaking out.

“A lot of you have no problem calling out the raging antisemitism on the left and are very quiet when it’s coming from the right,” Meghan McCain tweeted last week. “Antisemitism is a poison and a cancer in society no matter where it is coming from and I implore my friends with platforms to address this head on.”

Addressing antisemitism head on doesn’t mean these conservatives are not coming up short.

Wilson was not a random hire: She comes out of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s nation-changing venture that is informing much of Trump’s second term agenda. Her former boss at Project 2025, Russell Vought, now heads the Office of Management and Budget. And her depredations about Leo Frank, her enthusiastic invocation of Nazi slogans, were not adolescent tantrums; they are less than a year old.

Trump reinstated to a senior State Department role Darren Beattie, ousted from the first Trump administration for his white nationalism. Beattie, who says he is Jewish, has not reformed; he has doubled down on baiting Blacks and other minorities.

Elon Musk, who is reshaping government, platforms and dabbles in antisemitism. So does Tucker Carlson, who is close to Trump’s son Donald Jr. and who played a decisive role in the naming of J.D. Vance as vice president. Joe Rogan, the massively influential pro-Trump podcaster, has taken to platforming unabashed antisemites.

And Trump, yesterday, once again assumed the authority of determining who is Jewish and who is not, in the process turning “Palestinian” into a pejorative. “He used to be Jewish,” he said of Sen. Chuck Schumer. “He's not Jewish anymore. He's a Palestinian.”

As appalled as some Jewish conservatives are at these choices and expressions, like McCain is, they frame them as part of a broader onslaught of antisemitism from the left and the right.

“These people may consider themselves on opposite sides of the political aisle, but they are united in misery,” Alana Newhouse writes in Tablet. “One of the reasons we were so critical of the far-left mob was that we knew eventually it would empower a far-right one,” the editors of The Free Press say.

At JNS, Jonathan Tobin also acknowledges concerns with some of Trump’s hires, but uses it to accuse Democrats of hypocrisy because, he says, they ignored Israel and Jewish-hostile hires under Biden.

Left wing antisemitism is real, and poses a substantive threat, but to see it as a piece with the antisemitism that the Trump administration is enabling, if not peddling, is a way of not naming the problem.

Left wing antisemitism, casting Jews as oppressors undeserving of representation or protection, is the ideological descendant of classical Christian supersessionism, which at its most benign casts being Jewish as out of date and at its most malign as murderous and irredeemable.

Right wing antisemitism, casting Jews as inherently broken and evil, seeps out of the murky rivulets of post-Enlightenment ultranationalism positing the inherent superiority of races and cultures.

The strains intertwine, as haters often do: Nazis drew on Christian theology. Soviets and Islamists borrow Nazi imagery. The Klan and other Christian nationalists deploy the cross as a signifier of whiteness.

But identifying the strain is necessary to control it. “They’re all doing it!” may be satisfying short term but becomes part of the problem because it is not a cri de coeur, it is screaming into the void.

And it creates a definitional vacuum that allows each side to pretend its own antisemitism doesn’t exist.

The comparison of Biden hires to Trump hires is telling: The example that keeps popping up is Maher Bitar, the National Security Council staffer who two decades ago was active in Students for Justice in Palestine. Now he works for AIPAC-endorsed Sen. Adam Schiff.

Strident critics of Israel within the Biden administration quit in protest. White nationalists are lining up to join the Trump administration.

Democrats strove to keep Israel-critical (never mind antisemitic) voices off the convention stage last summer; Carlson was a keynote speaker at the Republican convention.

The longing for a recognition of superiority that underpins right-wing antisemitism dovetails with Trump’s longing for deference from the public, from other branches of government, from foreign leaders, even from hostages whose dreams are haunted by subjugation.

The antisemitism some Jewish students have endured is unconscionable. No student mid-university career should be made so uncomfortable to have to consider a transfer to another university.

But the moves that the victims of the emerging white nationalism face are measures worse: to go underground. To hide their identities. To leave the country. To be forced to leave the country.

History is always in flux: The worst place on earth for Jews from the 1950s through the 1980s were Marxist regimes. And as Bush modeled, there is a conservatism that upholds protections for the vulnerable.

That conservatism is in abeyance and pretending Jews are exempt from the new normal is a fool’s game. You can clean up the Great Replacement Theory, and pretend it’s about Democrats wanting to bring in migrant voters (itself a nonsense theory), but its underlying malign narrative of Jews replacing whites will inevitably explode into view and cost lives.

Worse, to the degree Jews are exempt, we are being set up to take the fall: An administration that with little precedent deports a Green Card holder for alleged antisemitism will do it again for anti-whiteness, and it will say, “But this is what the Jews wanted.” A president that teases ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip may one day cite the precedent along the southern border, and he will say “But this is what Israel does.”

Framing these actions with “Shalom” as Trump has done glues them to Jews.

Beware false messiahs and the drugs they peddle, because they will sacrifice the users when the reckoning comes.